How Do I Connect Looker to Other Apps?

Connecting Looker to your other business applications transforms your dashboards from static reports into active, integrated parts of your workflow. Instead of making your team log into another platform, you can bring data directly to them where they already work. This guide will walk you through the primary ways to connect Looker with other apps, from simple, built-in integrations to powerful custom solutions.

First Things First: Connecting Your Data Sources to Looker

Before you can send data from Looker, you need data flowing into it. It's a common point of confusion, but Looker doesn't actually store your business data. It provides a semantic modeling layer that sits on top of your existing database or data warehouse. This means Looker queries your data source in real-time to generate visualizations and reports.

So, the very first step in any Looker setup is establishing this connection. This typically requires administrative permissions in Looker and the credentials for your data source.

Types of Data Sources You Can Connect

Looker supports a wide range of SQL dialects and databases. Your analytics and engineering teams will have chosen a data warehouse that fits your company's needs. Common examples include:

• Google BigQuery: A serverless, highly-scalable cloud data warehouse.
• Snowflake: A popular cloud data platform known for performance and scalability.
• Amazon Redshift: A fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud.
• PostgreSQL: A powerful, open-source object-relational database system.
• MySQL: Another widely-used open-source relational database.

How to Establish a Connection

The actual process is managed within the Looker Admin panel and requires technical knowledge of your database. Here's a high-level overview of the steps involved:

1. Navigate to the Admin section of your Looker instance.
2. Under the Database menu, select Connections.
3. Click on Add Connection.
4. Select your database dialect (e.g., Google BigQuery, Snowflake) from the dropdown menu.
5. Fill in your database connection details, including the host, port, database name, username, and password. This is sensitive information that you can get from your IT or data team.
6. Configure additional settings as needed, such as persistent derived tables (PDTs) or connection pooling.
7. Test the connection to ensure Looker can communicate with your database. Once successful, Connect to finalize the setup.

Once your data source is connected, data modelers use LookML (Looker's modeling language) to define metrics, joins, and business logic before users can start exploring the data. With the foundation in place, you can now start sending that valuable data out to other applications.

Sending Looker Data to Other Apps with Looker Actions

The most straightforward way to integrate Looker's output with other tools is by using Looker Actions. Actions are pre-built integrations that let you send data, visualizations, and dashboards to common business applications with just a few clicks. This is perfect for setting up alerts, automating reports, and putting insights directly into your team's existing workflows.

Your Looker Admin needs to enable these integrations from the Looker Action Hub before they're available to users.

Popular Looker Actions and Their Uses

• Slack: Send a dashboard update to a project channel every morning or alert your support channel when a key metric crosses a threshold. Data can be sent as an image (PNG), PDF, or CSV.
• Google Drive & Google Sheets: Automate the delivery of raw data to a Google Sheet for further analysis or collaboration. You can create a new file with each delivery or overwrite an existing one.
• Email: The classic method. Schedule regular reports to be sent via email to key stakeholders, clients, or team members.
• Zapier: A powerful action that acts as a connector to thousands of other apps. You could send data from Looker to Zapier to trigger a new task in Asana, create a Trello card, or add a row to Airtable.
• Segment: Send curated user lists or data points from Looker to Segment, which can then be forwarded to your downstream marketing and product analytics tools.

How to Use Looker Actions: An Example with Slack

Let's say you want to send a visualization of your daily sales figures to your company's #sales-team Slack channel every morning at 9 am.

1. Navigate to Your Content: Open the Look or Dashboard you want to send.
2. Open the Scheduler: Click the gear icon in the top right corner and select Schedule delivery (for recurring deliveries) or Send (for a one-time dispatch).
3. Choose the Destination: In the "Where should this data go?" section, select the Slack icon.
4. Configure the Details:
5. Select the Format: Choose how you want the data to appear. For a visualization, PNG (image file of visualization) is a great choice. If you want the raw data, you can select CSV or TXT. Dashboards are often best sent as a PDF.
6. Set the Schedule (for scheduled deliveries):
7. Save or Send: Click Save to activate your schedule or Send for an immediate delivery. Now, your sales team will get a fresh report in Slack every single morning without you having to lift a finger.

Bringing Looker into Your Apps with Embedding

While Actions push data out, embedding allows you to pull your interactive Looker visuals directly into other websites, internal company wikis, or your own software product. This creates a seamless experience where users can interact with live data right where they are, without having to navigate to Looker.

Embedding is a powerful way to add value to your customer-facing applications by providing self-serve analytics.

Types of Embedding

• Public Embedding: Create a publicly accessible URL for a Look or visualization. This is perfect for embedding a chart in a blog post or on a public website. Be cautious, as anyone with the link can see the data.
• Private Embedding: This method is more common for internal use, such as embedding a dashboard into a private company portal (like Notion or Confluence). Users must be logged into Looker to see the embedded content.
• SSO (Single Sign-On) Embedding: The most advanced and secure option. This is used for embedding Looker content into external applications for your customers. It uses a secure authentication system to ensure that users are only seeing the data they're supposed to see, creating a seamless white-label experience within your own product.

How to Get an Embed URL

For private and public embedding, the process is straightforward:

1. Navigate to the Dashboard, Look, or Explore you want to embed.
2. Click the gear-style menu in the top right.
3. Select Get embed URL.
4. You can then copy the URL provided and use it in an <iframe>.

The code to embed this into your application would look something like this:

<pre><code> &lt,iframe src="https://yourcompany.looker.com/embed/looks/123" width="800" height="600" frameborder="0"&gt, &lt,/iframe&gt, </code></pre>

For developers, Looker also offers an Embed SDK (Software Development Kit) and an API Explorer to build more complex and deeply integrated user experiences.

Building Custom Connections with the Looker API

For complete control and flexibility, Looker provides a powerful REST API. An API (Application Programming Interface) is a set of rules that lets different software applications communicate with each other. By using the Looker API, you can programmatically manage almost every aspect of your Looker instance, opening the door to fully custom integrations.

Using the API requires programming knowledge and is a task for software developers or data engineers. You can generate API credentials for a user in the Admin panel.

What Can You Do with the Looker API?

The possibilities are nearly endless, but here are a few common use cases:

• Automate Complex Tasks: You could write a script that automatically runs a specific query every hour, checks the results for anomalies, and then uses that data to update a system outside of Looker.
• Manage Users and Content: Automatically provision or de-provision Looker licenses as employees join or leave the company, keeping your user management in sync with your HR systems.
• Build Custom Applications: Create a custom web application that lets users input specific parameters, which are then used to generate and display highly specific Looker data in real-time, going beyond what's possible with standard embedding.
• Dynamic Data Integration: Pull data from a specific Look directly into an internal financial modeling tool, ensuring your models are always running on the latest information from your data warehouse.

Developers can explore all the available API endpoints and even test calls in Looker's interactive API Explorer tool to get started.

Final Thoughts

Integrating Looker with your other tools is all about making data more accessible, timely, and actionable. You can connect your foundational data warehouses, use Looker Actions to push reports to apps like Slack and Google Sheets, embed live visualizations directly into your products, or use the API for unlimited custom workflows. These methods help break down data silos and bring insights directly into your team's decision-making process.

While powerful, setting all of this up can still create friction, especially for marketing and sales teams who don't have dedicated data support. We built Graphed to remove that complexity entirely. We make connecting data sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce painless with one-click integrations. Instead of learning a complex BI tool or writing code, you can just describe the dashboard you need in plain English and our AI builds it instantly, with live data that's always updating automatically.